NAME

       pidof - find the process ID of a running program

SYNOPSIS

       pidof  [-s]  [-c]  [-n]  [-x] [-z] [-o omitpid[,omitpid...]]  [-o omitpid[,omitpid...]...]
       [-d sep] program [program...]

DESCRIPTION

       pidof finds the process id's (PIDs) of the named programs. It prints  those  id's  on  the
       standard  output.  This  program  is  on  some  systems  used in run-level change scripts,
       especially when the system has a System-V like rc structure. In that  case  these  scripts
       are  located  in  /etc/rc?.d,  where  ?  is  the runlevel. If the system has a start-stop-
       daemon(8) program that should be used instead.

OPTIONS

       -s     Single shot - this instructs the program to only return one pid.

       -c     Only return process PIDs that are running  with  the  same  root  directory.   This
              option  is  ignored for non-root users, as they will be unable to check the current
              root directory of processes they do not own.

       -n     Avoid stat(2) system function call on all binaries which  are  located  on  network
              based file systems like NFS.  Instead of using this option the variable PIDOF_NETFS
              may be set and exported.

       -q     Do not display matched PIDs to standard out. Simply exit with a status of  true  or
              false to indicate whether a matching PID was found.

       -x     Scripts too - this causes the program to also return process id's of shells running
              the named scripts.

       -z     Try to detect processes which  are  stuck  in  zombie  (Z)  status.  Usually  these
              processes  are skipped as trying to deal with them can cause pidof or related tools
              to hang. Note: In the past pidof would  ignore  processes  in  the  uninterruptable
              state  (D), unless the -z flag was specified. This is no longer the case. The pidof
              program will find and report processes in the D state whether -z  is  specified  or
              not.

       -d sep Tells  pidof  to  use sep as an output separator if more than one PID is shown. The
              default separator is a space.

       -o omitpid
              Tells pidof to omit processes with that process id. The special pid  %PPID  can  be
              used  to  name  the parent process of the pidof program, in other words the calling
              shell or shell script.

EXIT STATUS

       0      At least one program was found with the requested name.

       1      No program was found with the requested name.

NOTES

       pidof is actually the same program as killall5(8); the program behaves  according  to  the
       name under which it is called.

       When pidof is invoked with a full pathname to the program it should find the pid of, it is
       reasonably safe. Otherwise it is possible that it returns PIDs of  running  programs  that
       happen  to have the same name as the program you're after but are actually other programs.
       Note that the executable name of running processes  is  calculated  with  readlink(2),  so
       symbolic links to executables will also match.

       Zombie processes or processes in disk sleep (states Z and D, respectively) are ignored, as
       attempts to access the stats of these will sometimes fail.  The -z flag (see above)  tells
       pidof  to  try  to  detect  these sleeping and zombie processes, at the risk of failing or
       hanging.

SEE ALSO

       shutdown(8), init(8), halt(8), reboot(8), killall5(8)

AUTHOR

       Miquel van Smoorenburg ⟨miquels@cistron.nl⟩